The Tech That Makes New Airplanes And Runways Safer

Enhanced and synthetic vision systems (inset) blend GPS information with a topographical database to create a moving digital map of unseen terrain and hazards. (Photograph by Sam Chui)

From Popular Mechanics:

In our Anatomy of a Plane Crash feature, PM investigates the causes behind Air France 447's disappearance. Here are some of the advances in technology for airports, cockpits and airframes—systems that work in tandem to make air flight safer.

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In 2010, The Civilian Space Industry Finally Takes Off

The Final Countdown: October 15, 2009: Virgin Galactic’s bullet-nosed rocket, SpaceShipTwo, sits in the hangar of Scaled Composites in Mojave, California, awaiting a paint job before its public debut in December. Click here to launch the gallery for a closer look at SpaceShipTwo under construction. John B. Carnett

From Popular Science:

Who needs the space shuttle? Take a tour inside the private space industry and its innovative, efficient plans to get astronauts into space when NASA retires its old ride.

For a traveler heading up the highway toward the Mojave Air and Space Port, in the desert 70 miles north of Los Angeles, the surroundings are ghostly. Silent 747s and DC-10 jumbo jets from defunct airlines, along with smaller 727s and DC-9s, some cut up or resting on pylons, are visible from miles away, looking frozen and forlorn. Parked along the road at the airport entrance is a 1962 Convair 990, which began its life as an American Airlines jet airliner. Now the wind whistles through its nacelles and birds nest in its wheel wells.

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Large Moon Of Uranus May Explain Odd Tilt

A massive moon that orbited Uranus in the past may explain the planet's extreme tilt (Image: NASA/ESA/M. Showalter/SETI Institute)

From New Scientist:

Please try to resist the childish jokes, but the fact is that the odd tilt of Uranus may be the result of a particularly large moon.

Uranus spins on an axis almost parallel with the plane of the solar system, rather than perpendicular to it – though why it does this nobody knows. One theory is that the tilt is the result of a collision with an Earth-sized object, but this "hasn't succeeded in explaining much of anything", says Ignacio Mosqueira of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Why, for example, are the orbits of Uranus's 27 known moons not also tilted?

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Earth Much More Sensitive To Global Warming Than Thought

Factory smoke. Photo: Martin Pope

From The Telegraph:

The Earth may be 50 per cent more sensitive to the warming effect of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas than has previously been thought, scientists claim.

A new study suggests bigger cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions may be needed to prevent drastic long term climate change.

The evidence was obtained by scientists looking back three million years to the Pliocene epoch, when global temperatures were 5.4F (3C) to 9F (5C) higher than they are today.

They found that levels of CO2 in the atmosphere at the time should not have produced such a warm world.

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Copenhagen Climate Change Summit To Produce As Much CO2 As An African Country

From The Daily Mail:

It is being hyped as the summit that will save the planet.

But according to critics, next week's climate change talks in Copenhagen are more likely to cost the earth.

Researchers have estimated that the bill for the 12-day jamboree will top £130million - and will generate as much greenhouse gas as an entire Africa country.

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Copenhagen Summit Urged To Take Climate Change Action

From The BBC:

Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen has described the UN climate summit in Copenhagen as an "opportunity the world cannot afford to miss".

Opening the two-week conference in the Danish capital, he told delegates from 192 countries a "strong and ambitious climate change agreement" was needed.

About 100 leaders are to attend the meeting, which is intended to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

The UN says an unprecedented number of countries have promised emissions cuts.

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Historical Colonization versus Historical Navies and Future Spaceships

From Next Big Future:

In terms of the scale of the effort for colonizing North America, I think it is useful to compare the size of the naval fleets of the time and other historical benchmarks. We know how large the military is today and the share of the total economy that it has. It will be more useful to approximate how large the interplanetary space travel industry will need to be before an interstellar colonization expedition would be a reasonably sustainable activity.

This relates to the discussion of spaceships and whether interstellar spaceships will happen

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Gasoline From Vinegar

Photo: Composting biofuels: Inside this white building, piles of sorghum are broken down into acids. The tanks in the foreground are used for pretreatment and for delivering a mixed culture containing many different organisms that break down biomass. The acids they produce can be used to make gasoline and other chemicals. Credit: Terrabon

From Technology Review:

A process that converts acids from garbage into fuel gets a boost.

A company that has developed a process for converting organic waste and other biomass into gasoline--Terrabon, based in Houston--recently announced a partnership with Waste Management, the giant garbage-collection and -disposal company based in Houston. The partnership could help Terrabon bring its technology to market.

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Nanowires Key To Future Transistors, Electronics

Researchers are closer to using tiny devices called semiconducting nanowires to create a new generation of ultrasmall transistors and more powerful computer chips. The researchers have grown the nanowires with sharply defined layers of silicon and germanium, offering better transistor performance. As depicted in this illustration, tiny particles of a gold-aluminum alloy were alternately heated and cooled inside a vacuum chamber, and then silicon and germanium gases were alternately introduced. As the gold-aluminum bead absorbed the gases, it became "supersaturated" with silicon and germanium, causing them to precipitate and form wires. (Credit: Purdue University, Birck Nanotechnology Center/Seyet LLC)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 3, 2009) — A new generation of ultrasmall transistors and more powerful computer chips using tiny structures called semiconducting nanowires are closer to reality after a key discovery by researchers at IBM, Purdue University and the University of California at Los Angeles.

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Mind-Machine Breakthrough: People Type With Just Thoughts

Electrodes placed directly on the surface of peoples' brains allow them to type just by thinking of letters. Image credit: stockxpert

From Live Science:

By focusing on images of letters, people with electrodes in their brains can type with just their minds, scientists now reveal.

These findings make up one more step on the road to mind-machine interfaces that may one day help people communicate with just their thoughts. Researchers have recently employed brain scans to see numbers and maybe even pull videos from inside people's heads.

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To Deflect An Asteroid, Try A Lasso, Not ANuke

From Wired Science:

To save the world from the real threat of a major asteroid impact, one engineer has imagined a scheme similar to George Bailey’s wish to lasso the moon for his sweetheart in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

The plan is to attach a gigantic weight to an Earth-bound asteroid using an enormous cord. This crazy-sounding contraption would change the asteroid’s center of mass and subsequently its trajectory, averting a potentially catastrophic scenario.

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In The Brain, Seven Is A Magic Number

From ABC News:

New Findings on Why You Have Trouble Remembering More Digits.

Having a tough time recalling a phone number someone spoke a few minutes ago or forgetting items from a mental grocery list is not a sign of mental decline; in fact, it's natural.

Countless psychological experiments have shown that, on average, the longest sequence a normal person can recall on the fly contains about seven items. This limit, which psychologists dubbed the "magical number seven" when they discovered it in the 1950s, is the typical capacity of what's called the brain's working memory.

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Will Gadget Revolutionize Our Reading Habits?

From San Francisco Chronicle:

Author Jeff Vande Zande was pleased when his latest book reached a digital milestone - it "went Kindle," formatted as an electronic book for Amazon.com's portable e-reader.

Although the college English professor from Michigan is hopeful about the new market his novel, "Landscape with Fragmented Figures," might reach, he isn't quite sold on electronic readers and still prefers the look, feel and "weathered page" smell of a printed book.

"Not all books are in Kindle edition, so for me, it was a big deal," Vande Zande said. However, he believes "the Kindle is not going to revolutionize books in the same way as the Internet and the iPod have revolutionized how we take in music."

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Dissection Begins On Famous Brain

From The New York Times:

SAN DIEGO — The man who could not remember has left scientists a gift that will provide insights for generations to come: his brain, now being dissected and digitally mapped in exquisite detail.

The man, Henry Molaison — known during his lifetime only as H.M., to protect his privacy — lost the ability to form new memories after a brain operation in 1953, and over the next half century he became the most studied patient in brain science.

He consented years ago to donate his brain for study, and last February Dr. Jacopo Annese, an assistant professor of radiology at the University of California, San Diego, traveled across the country and flew back with the brain seated next to him on Jet Blue.

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Top UN Climate Official Confident That New Pact Will Be Reached In Copenhagen

From UN News Centre:

On the eve of the historic United Nations climate change gathering in Copenhagen, Denmark, a top official with the world body today expressed confidence that the event will deliver a comprehensive and ambitious new deal.

The two-week talks are set to kick off tomorrow in the Danish capital, and by the end of the summit, Governments must adequately respond to the urgent challenge posed by climate change, said Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

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Ottawa Businessman To Be Canada's Second Space Tourist

John Criswick, an Ottawa entrepreneur who has booked a US$200,000 flight on board Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, stands in front of the plane at its unveiling in July 2008. (HO, Virgin Galactic/THE CANADIAN PRESS)

From CTV News:

MONTREAL — An Ottawa entrepreneur plans to be in California on Monday for the official unveiling of a vehicle that will help him fulfil his childhood dream of being an astronaut.

John Criswick and 13 other Canadians are among 300 space tourists who have made reservations with Virgin Galactic for a trip that will take them on a flight 110 kilometres above the Earth.

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Tiger Woods Should Have Used SpoofCard

From Discovery News:

Oh man. What's going on Tiger Woods? It seems like his world is crashing down around him. Literally. I know he's all about his privacy. Won't talk to the media about personal stuff. But now this voice mail, which he allegedly left on Jamiee Grubbs' mobile phone, has been leaked all over the nation. It's just not looking good.

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School IT Director Loses Job Over Space Alien Hunt

Photo: Silhouette of Very Large Array (VLA), which has contributed in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). In Arizona, a school IT director lost his job over a hunt for alien life. Newscom

From Christian Science Monitor:

District says the former employee's quest for ET will cost it $1.2 million.

The hunt for alien life led one Arizona man on a hunt for a new job.

Brad Niesluchowski used his role as information technology director of an Arizona school district to install SETI@home on computers at work. The free program, part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) at the University of California at Berkeley, downloads and analyzes data from a radio telescope constantly scanning the cosmos for galactic neighbors.

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Astronauts To Taste 'Space Sushi'

From Space Travel:

US astronaut Timothy Creamer said on Thursday he was impatient to taste "space sushi" courtesy of his Japanese crewmate after they arrive on the International Space Station (ISS) later this month.

"We can't wait for when Soichi makes us sushi!" Creamer said, referring to Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, at a press conference at the Star City cosmonaut training centre outside Moscow, the Interfax news agency reported.

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Balancing Protein Intake, Not Cutting Calories, May Be Key to Long Life

Rows of jars containing Drosophila, also known as fruitflies, being bred in laboratory conditions. As Drosophila can be bred easily in mass and have a short lifespan, scientists frequently use them in research, particularly in the study of genes. (Credit: Wellcome Library, London)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 6, 2009) — Getting the correct balance of proteins in our diet may be more important for healthy ageing than reducing calories, new research funded by the Wellcome Trust and Research into Ageing suggests.

The research may help explain why 'dietary restriction' (also known as calorie restriction) -- reducing food intake whilst maintaining sufficient quantities of vitamins, minerals and other important nutrients -- appears to have health benefits. In many organisms, such as the fruit fly (drosophila), mice, rats and the Rhesus monkey, these benefits include living longer. Evidence suggests that dietary restriction can have health benefits for humans, too, though it is unclear whether it can increase longevity.

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